Watch: The 10 Best Slow-Motion Scenes Ever

When used properly, few special effects are as exhilarating and awe-inspiring as slow-motion. While the problem is often that it's used to excess, slow-motion provides not just a heightened view of the action at hand, but also increases suspense, enhances the impact of a given emotion, and adds weight and force to superheroic feats. As evidenced again by this week's The Grandmaster — a martial-arts epic by one of modern cinema's masters of slow-motion, China's Wong Kar-wai — the device underscores the beauty of combat and the depth of the passions involved in it. In honor of this latest feat — and with all due respect to those that just missed the cut, like Reservoir Dogsand Once Upon a Time in America — here's a look back at ten sterling examples of the technique.

Rushmore (1998)

No director working today loves, or is more skilled at handling, slow-motion than Wes Anderson. Though the shot of Gwyneth Paltrow exiting a bus in The Royal Tenenbaums remains one of his most enduring images, his movies' most affecting slow-mo moment occurs during the finale of 1998's Rushmore. Reducing the speed of its final shot so that it serves as a celebratory panorama, it's an elegant, ideally tender punctuation to the film's tale of youthful romance.

The Matrix (1999)

The Matrix's groundbreaking bullet-time effects may technically require their own classification, but as evidenced by the below scene of Neo and Trinity storming a skyscraper entryway, slow-motion is a big part of the Wachowskis' aesthetic arsenal — and a prime way that, by bestowing their gunplay with balletic grace and fluidity, their innovative film distinguished itself from the action-film pack.

Chariots of Fire (1981)

Perhaps the most oft-imitated slow-motion scene in movie history, the opening of Chariots of Fire became such a cultural touchstone — aided, in large part, by its famous theme music — that it's now become the most memorable part of the film. A simple shot of men running on the beach, it's an introduction that impeccably establishes its characters' joy, determination, and desire in silent, methodical snapshots.

Raging Bull (1980)

Boasting the most accurate and brutal fight scenes ever committed to celluloid, Raging Bull's in-ring action is a blistering mixture of speed stocks, vantage points, and flashbulbs. Director Martin Scorsese highlights the ferocity and ugliness of punches delivered (and suffered) by protagonist Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) with sudden moments of slow-motion that fixate on the blood and sweat of characters' faces, allowing viewers — as in the below scene — to soak in the viciousness of both the sport and La Motta himself.

The Wild Bunch (1969)

Few slow-motion scenes are as renowned as the finale of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, a searing shootout that turns violence at once gruesome and majestic. The four-and-a-half-minute tour de force captures the gnarly cruelty and nastiness of bloodshed, as well as the misery it causes for everyone involved. From the sight of dying men falling off rooftops to that of William Holden's agonized face, it's the slow-motion-loving Peckinpah's greatest achievement.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece operates throughout on a grand scale, and so it's fitting that the film opens with a reveal of planetary alignment in which slow-motion helps to create a sense of enormity and awe. That Kubrick could achieve so much with so little speaks to the director's own enormous skill.

Seven Samurai (1954)

Akira Kurosawa's samurai classic recognizes that, in order to maximize its value, slow-motion is best employed in moderation. So when the Japanese director does suddenly draw upon it, the effect is unbelievably powerful, as in this deceptively simple showdown between two swordsmen, which ends with a slow-motion shot that's so pitch-perfect, it's become a cliché.

Watchmen (2009)

Director Zack Snyder never met a scene he didn't want to drench in slow-motion. Yet if the filmmaker can be criticized for overusing the device, he nonetheless employs it to sumptuous effect in the credit sequence for Watchmen. A montage that recounts the fictionalized alterna-history of crime-fighters over the latter half of the 20th century, it's an expertly modulated and manicured sequence (scored to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'") that's beautiful on a purely visual level, and uses slow-motion to create a haunting nostalgia and wistfulness that hovers over the rest of the proceedings.

In the Mood for Love (2000)

Wong Kar-wai's moody romanticism reached its apex with 2000's acclaimed In the Mood for Love, a period piece about ill-fated amour that's awash in amorous imagery. Of all the scenes that utilize slow-motion to highlight the sexiness and yearning of its central relationship, none are better than the below one, which — detailing its two protagonists passing each other on their way to a shop, before quickly greeting each other face-to-face in a narrow stairwell — pulsates with longing suppressed beneath carefully controlled facades.

Hard Boiled (1992)

At least during his early-'90s heyday working in his native Hong Kong, John Woo was the undisputed master of stylish shootouts, using exaggerated slow-motion to accentuate his stories' pulse-pounding tension and overcooked melodrama. Of all his choreographic triumphs, none is better than the teahouse skirmish from 1992's Hard Boiled, in large part because it uses slow-motion somewhat sparingly, so that when it's employed for the scene's true money shot — of Chow Yun-Fat's cop sliding down a staircase railing while firing two guns at once — it makes the moment truly unforgettable.

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